In a surprise announcement, Google+ creator and Senior Vice President Vic Gundotra announced his departure from Google on Thursday, and it wasn’t long before industry observers figured out why. Executives at the search engine giant have been short on patience for the nascent social platform, which initially found favor among thousands of techies but couldn’t…

Twitter today unveiled a new upgraded Twitter profile view for users. Similar in style and construction to a Facebook profile page, the new feature expands the basic toolset available to Twitter users, allowing them to add larger profile pictures and custom headers. Additionally, users can pin a favorite Tweet that exemplifies who they are, and…

Is “Silicon Valley” funny? Three episodes into Mike Judge’s dissection of Silicon Valley, the eponymous locale of his new HBO show, and still we have yet to find one truly likeable character. That is unless you’re into shy clucks of insecurity or the sophisticated slacker vibe reserved for college engineering dropouts who look down on…

Leave it to the smarm of Silicon Valley’s technocrats to make Kid Rock a sympathetic character. The premier episode of Mike Judge’s sharp new HBO satire, “Silicon Valley,” begins at a mansion house party in which Dustin Moskovitz, Eric Schmidt, Elon Musk and some other guy who created some company I’ve never heard of are…

Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich stepped down today after widespread social media-based reports reminded consumers of the former chief technology officer’s financial support of California Proposition 8, the 2008 anti-gay marriage initiative and state constitutional amendment that was overturned last year in a landmark Supreme Court ruling. Inc. magazine called it “perhaps the world’s first social…

When Facebook announced last week that it intended to purchase the Kickstarter-launched Oculus VR virtual reality headset maker for some $2 billion, the social media giant thought the most controversial aspect of the deal was that the headset had nothing to do with Facebook. But the real controversy surfaced after the news, and it comes from…

When Pinterest decided last August to play hardball with a smaller rival, suing start-up Pintrip for trademark infringement and unfair competition, it didn’t expect much of a fight. In its suit, filed in August by attorney Harvey Siskind in US Disctrict Court in San Francisco, Pinterest said it is “a world-renowned provider of social media…

The Obama administration is preparing a legislative proposal that would overhaul the National Security Agency’s notorious bulk phone records program, according to the New York Times. The new proposal, which would join a wave of similar proposals in Congress, is primarily aimed at downsizing the security agency’s program of capturing wide-reaching data from Americans’ telephone…

Los Altos-based Box Inc. has filed for a much-anticipated S-1 document for initial public offering in which the company hopes to raise about $250 million. That amount is far less than many had expected, and raises concerns about its future. Box has already gone through multiple rounds of venture financing totaling nearly $360 million. Officials…